Too long to post all of it. The good/bad of Eliot Spitzer and the potential real reason he was taken down.

Why do people, who know who they are up against, make themselves vulnerable?

The story will be sex and Spitzer's sins- not the wholesale raid on the treasury and our futures to benefit the rich few.




http://www.gregpalast.com/elliot-spitzer-g...iled/#more-1979

The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked



"While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied."

.....


"Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.

Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called “securitization.”

......

"And that very same day the bail-out was decided – what a coinkydink! – the man called, ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.

Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, “Take him down today!” Naw, that’s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press – one was “Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer” - made clear to Bush’s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn’t Bin Laden.

It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.”

Bush, Spitzer said right in the headline, was the “Predator Lenders’ Partner in Crime.” The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.

Spitzer wrote, “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.”

But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story – of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all – now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun."

It's a story of worrying about who is fiddling while Rome continues to burn. The same thing happened in the 1920's. Everyone was worried about where Harding was hiding his 'nuts' instead of financial policies of the GOP sending this nation to financial ruin! It wasn't until the Crash of '29 that this nation finally woke up to meet the Great Depression!

Herbert Hoover was an excellent family man, but it didn't help him from stopping Black Tuesday.

And it won't help McCain to be a Maverick when people in this nation can no longer afford the gas they need to get to work. Much less handle a mortgage payment.

But until we are all selling apples on the corner like they did in the 30's, will we come to understand how 'little' was the importance of Spitzer's actions...Or Clinton's...

Maybe when we are all living in Cardboard City because of these 'bad' GOP policies then we will be lining the interior of our 'box' with old copies of The Post or Enquirer with old headlines about Clinton and Spitzer...and wondering WHY it was so important at the time.

But we will never learn... :dripple: